Next a friend brings me muddy photos to fix--
since Lily's real quilts breathe fire. I slide
the saturation screaming, till it's true. Then I

Fade to black: mix ink cave-dark, and with a dry
brush I illustrate a dream-poem by
Roswila, queen of dreamku: A Gothic Tale. I try

The leftover ink on a rough sketch of my
own dream Sleepers All. Next pencil and digital
tints for that dream of the mad old man who can

Surf the San Andreas, and lay the illos in.
Then polish and trim the text of all...
Gnaw the harsh bark smooth. Art's all I am.

Then to the piano. Lay down a rap
confessing I'm a thin skin smile,
masking a skittish changeling animal.
Still too sad and fursonal--strip down!
Gnaw me smooth for all. Art's all I am.

A respite? In the fat-moon eve, Luna leads
Chihuahua Jupiter on a little walk
through cloudwisps tousled as maestro hair...
we're off to Yoshi's sushi bar to hear
Eight-Legged Monster--jazz and miso. Tasty
if innumerate: I count eleven legs or more
though mostly they play to a count of four.
Too bad! All but a couple of songs are
straight tarantular dances, major-key,
and then the Legs just noodle frantically.

Twice in the evening they slow and swing, oh
lyric snakenotes ooze from trumpet or
baritone sax. Solo so smooth, so low!
But too many legs just spoil the octopus.
(I whine because I long to join and jam.)
Now, 1 AM, I smooth this verse. Art's all I am.

THAT NIGHT

I'm in rural China. Rivers, crags. A local girl
tells me her worst woe. And to my cynical
surprise

even to me it's new: there's a spot nearby
where legend recounts how she horribly died.
All lies!

Here she stands. Yet her village swears she was killed
in a notably outré way. And happening still!
That is

she's mythically dying there all the time. It gets so dull!
A dam just flooded the gorge, so they trucked her death uphill.
Now she's

memorially mythtaken high on a misty ridge! And why?
Does it matter exactly where you localize
a lie?

Folktale and gossip cut her dead too, though she's not.
Their trouble's not personal but a pattern to be fought!
They're so

tired tired tired of it though! Ready to lop their Chi-
nese roots, be defiantly urban & mod. "Can't we
just drop it?"

How can folks see through fake mythtory
to you alive before them, if to the lie
they cling?

NOTES IN THE MORNING

The dream reminds me I did one non-artsy thing today--read an article in Foreign Policy magazine on China's struggle to develop a domestic market. People have money now, but they're wary--don't trust prosperity. Understandable: haunted by a century of famines, purges and war!

I also thought today of Jung Chang's scathing biography of Mao, which proves he betrayed friends, murdered anyone in his way, and lied on a truly epic scale, papering over history with his fat face.

But why these two particular Chinese women? They lived around the Three Gorges or someplace similar, with southern limestone crags, busy river traffic, a dam... When I woke they weren't anyone I know.

They seemed quite solid and alive. The majority view seemed just wrong. So why'd they get labeled dead? Politics? Unless my judgment's so far gone I mistook two ghosts for the living! Maybe I was blind. Just in case, I've drawn them a little translucent round the edges...

Is there some analogous contrast between my own inner sense of myself and my reputation? Or a gap between my dream-view of myself and my waking one?

ACTION: unsure. Really unsure.

Maybe the dream proposes that I do
what's on the mind of the unghostly two--
strip off all tradition, live or die
bared to my devices, self-invented!
(Accept that all the hog-butchers in Chi-
cago and Wuhan will say "He's demented.")
But what would I do? How to begin?
Who is that artless I, the new I Am?